Tutorials, Guides, Tips, and Tricks from Everyday Experiences

I recently got my hands on a Beagle Board to play around with at work, so I figured I would document and create a set of scripts that anybody can use to quickly setup a Beagle Board to boot from an SD card (2GB+). I’m going to assume you know the standard blurb of instructions: copy/download scripts, give them executable rights, and then run with root privileges while taking caution as to not mess up your Linux box. Also, please keep in mind that images and file locations change over time. Let’s begin!

The first script (setup_sd) will setup your SD card with the proper partitions and geometry. All you need to do is tell it where your SD card is. If you don’t know, use either dmesg or fdisk -l to find out. Likely, it’s located at /dev/sdb, so that’s what I’ll use here as an example on how to use this first script: setup_sd /dev/sdb. This script was obtained from XorA. All I added was a quick check to make sure the user is calling it properly.

The second script (load_sd) will obtain and install the required files to boot the Beagle Board to the SD card. Usage is very similar to the above script, load_sd /dev/sdb. I would recommend creating a directory specifically for running this script within, ie. mkdir beagleboard; cd beagleboard, this way, everything is nice and tidy.

After these scripts have ran successfully, all you need to do is interrupt the startup sequence of Uboot (Beagle Board’s bootloader) and setup the environment variables to boot from the SD card as mentioned here. For convenience, I have placed the commands you need to run here: